This Vancouver-Made Cookbook is Half Recipes, Half Chef Memoirs—and All for a Good Cause

Chef stories and all-star dishes make for a delicious combo. 

Much like many of our favourite dishes are mash-ups of inspirations and cultures, Food Stories combines two great tastes that taste great together: recipes and stories.

It’s the brainchild of Curatorialist editor Hakan Burcuoğlu, who reached out to 20 B.C. chefs for memories and the meals that spark them and collected the whole mess into a beautiful cookbook full of local food heroes and the dishes they love—Joël Watanabe of Kissa Tanto, Andrea Carlson of Burdock and Co, and Boulevard‘s Alex Chen are just a few of the collaborators in a book full of culinary characters.

Full profits from the sales of Food Stories will be donated to A Better Life Foundation’s meal program, so grab a copy directly from the publisher for a good cause, and while you’re waiting for it to ship, taste test one of the offerings: Chef Deniz Tarakcioglu’s Turkish menemen with mushrooms and feta. As the book reports, the Novo Pizzeria chef has been a breakfast enthusiast since his early days:

“Breakfast is convenience, it is vulnerability. It’s a new day, people aren’t on their high horses. It’s as real a relationship is going to get. But it’s also a meal, and an industry, disfavored by dinner cooks. And that, makes me love it even more.”

The culprit behind Deniz’ breakfast monomania is his grandmother—a gregarious woman with whom he spent his entire childhood, in the absence of his toiling parents. Every morning, a salacious smorgasbord it was—“My childhood breakfasts were royale. Two soft-boiled eggs atop grilled sourdough, soaked in olive oil, along with tomatoes, cucumbers, and chilis—the Turkish trinity.” His sentiment is unmistakable, for it’s very Turkish, but it’s also well-founded—each egg a memory, morphing into manifest.

Recipe: Turkish Menemen with Mushrooms and Feta